76 speed this year. How, for that matter, would the maxims of a lifetime in the military translate into the political arena? Timing, readiness, the calculation of odds: these things enter equally into military and political campaigns. But the political arena presents questions that do not arise in the armed forces. To begin with, a military commander seldom has to decide whose side he will join. Powell, though a registered independent, came of age politically in Republican Admin- istrations and cast votes for Reagan and Bush. "If I were to decide to enter poli- tics and run for the Presidency," he told Barbara Walters, "the easiest way to do it, I think, would be as a Republican. It would probably be more of an issue of me making compromises than it would be for the Republican Party making compromises, if we're talking about 1995-96." Will he make those compromises? Certainly Powell's relations with the black political establishment, such as it is, have sometimes been strained. He is sen- sitive to the hazards of criticizing black leadership ("They will jump in your face in a minute") but is undeterred by them. He views the left-listing congressional Black Caucus as a phenomenon of reseg- regation; it's collectively in thrall to "the redistricting of these little squirrelly black districts all over," he says. "That gives us more black congressmen, but with less power and less influence." N or, by his reckoning, have they been eager to take responsibility for risky poli- cies they've helped to initiate. The Black Caucus has of- ten sought to make American policy more sensitive to Third World concerns; racial solidar- ity is meant to extend beyond national boundaries. And Powell himself is not immune to the mystique of origins. He has spoken of his first visit to West Mrica as a profoundly moving experi- ence--one that reinforced his sense of an ancestral identity. "I am an Mrican, too," he has declared. Still, his attitude toward Mrican nations does not exactly brim with sentimentality. 'We have nations in Mrica that are going backward in time hundreds of years," he asserts. "They are abandoning their colonial heritage, which was sort of the passage into the twentieth century." General Abacha, the despotic ruler of Nigeria, incurs sharp disapproval-"He has the worst C.I.A. bio I've ever read, and I've read lots of them"-but then so do his subjects: "Ni- geria is a nation of ninety million people. With enormous wealth. And what they could have done with that wealth over the last twenty years-they just pissed it away. They Just tend not to be honest. Nigerians as a group, frankly, are mar- vellous scammers. I mean, it is in their national culture." So the General, to say the least, cannot be accused of knee-jerk Mrocentrism. And yet Powell's fit with the Reagan revolution was clearly imperfect. On the one hand, he was grateful for its invigo- rating effect on the military, which he felt had been undervalued by Carter. On the other hand, Powell is someone for whom the adjective "right-wing" is not a positive designation; someone for whom the adjective "middle-of-the- road" is no pejorative. And though most of his political friends are Republicans, many are not. Representative Kweisi Mfume, the outspoken former leader of the congressional Black Caucus, might be expected to provide a voice of dissent, but he turns out to be an ardent booster. "General Powell is the best that we can be," he says. Would he support him? "I was at his house a week ago and I told him that whenever he decided, please count me among the persons he would call first," Representative Mfume replies. 'We shook on it. That says it all." Certainly the issue of affirmative ac- tion seems to be something of a wedge between Powell and many of his Republican friends. When he's in a formal mood, he care- fully distinguishes between quotas and "equal opportunity," and discourses upon the wrong- ful conflation of the two. But he can also bring a certain fervor to the topic. "It's amazing how affirmative ac- tion has suddenly become Issue No.1. One of my Republican friends had the nerve to send me one of their newslet- ters a few weeks ago saying that we had to get rid of affirmative action because we couldn't keep putting these programs in place for allegations of ' vague and an- cient wrongs.' I almost went crazy. I said, Vague? Vague? Denny's wouldn't serve four black Secret Service agents guard- ing the President of the United States. The Chicago Federal Reserve Bank just told us somethIng that any black could have told you-that it's harder to get a THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 25, 1995 loan if you're black than if you're white. And we got Pete Wilson out there say- ing that affirmative action is bad because there are eight-tenths of one per cent more black students in the University of California school system as a result of fif- teen years of affirmative action. This is the worst problem the country has? And I said, 'If there is a program that is a "get over" program, then get rid of it, sure.' But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater " I mention the F.C.C. program grant- ing minority set-asides of television and radio stations. He's intimately ac- quainted with it: it enabled him, in partnership with Bruce Llewellyn and others, to acquire a Buffalo television statIon ten years ago. "But it's black- owned," he says. "If you got a bunch of white guys with a brother fronting for them, get rid of it. That doesn't serve any purpose for us. What is troubling now is that we have essentially said that the principle of lowering bootstraps for peo- ple to climb up is bad." And he speaks about having been told by the Reagan adviser Stuart Spencer, who is one of the inventors of the political-consultancy business, that he was too socially con- scious to mesh with the current Repub- lican agenda. The figure of Powell, it should be said, elicits surprising warmth among many blacks whose relation to the politi- cal establishlnent has often been more adversarial than not. Marian Wright Edelman, the left-liberal head of the Children's Defense Fund and herself a best-selling author, recalls, "The first time I heard him speak at the Council on Foreign Relations, he was so effective that I had to force myself to remember that we disagree on certain military poli- cies. He certainly has a central core of in- tegrity." Another prominent advocate, Hugh Price, who is president of the Na- tional Urban League, is sure that "if Powell is elected, he will be elected be- cause the Americans are hungry for a person who stitches the country back to- gether again-who brings a sense of de- cency, coupled with a sense of resolve and toughness." Invoking Powell's mili- tary background, the black philosopher and social critic Cornel West says, "If he could push through a Marshall Plan for the cities, that would be extraordinary. My hunch is that it would be very diffi- cult to do, but he might be open to it. I